The Emperor: I Think I Just Heard Someone Curse Me to Die Young

On the metal walkway of Zone C-3, the last surviving Player of Seventh Squad looked at the chunks of his teammates scattered across the ground, then at Liam in the distance, completely unharmed and standing with elegant poise. Suddenly, he smiled in resignation.

He cursed bluntly, "Fuck your game designers. We took out the first BOSS with a suicide blast, so now the second BOSS is built for agility? Targeted. This is straight-up targeting!"

Though Liam did not quite understand what this mortal was saying, it could tell from his posture that he had given up resisting. Moving without a sound, it came before the Player like a ghost and asked in cold, pure High Gothic, "How did you find me?"

The Player took a deep breath, then suddenly spat at Liam's inhuman face.

"Ptooey!"

Liam tilted its head slightly, easily avoiding the futile insult. The next instant, its claw-blade left a dark violet afterimage and cleanly severed the Player in two at the waist.

What a pity. I still didn't get an answer...

With a trace of regret, Liam did not linger and began moving swiftly along the pipes. Since the Cultists' expulsion was now inevitable, it intended to leave this Chemical Refinery at once rather than remain any longer. Yet it had not gone far when footsteps dozens of times denser than before sounded ahead of it.

Liam felt a flicker of irritation. Why did these mortals keep coming in wave after wave? Was there no end to them?!

This time, it no longer bothered concealing its trail. Instead, it became a deadly shadow and charged directly into the approaching mass of humans. A pure slaughter began. Severed limbs flew everywhere as laser beams and bullets futilely chased its afterimages. Though the Players could clearly tell where Liam was through the IFF System, they simply could not lock onto it, much less hit it.

"Fuck! This thing's speed, strength, reflexes—every stat is at least three times ours!" one Player roared despairingly before being cut in half at the waist.

Quite a few Players also attempted to injure Liam through self-destruction, but without exception, they failed—before they even got halfway there, Liam had already swept past them and cut them into several pieces. Soon, every Player realized a cruel fact: unless they restricted its movements, they could not hurt this pure-blood Genestealer at all.

Meanwhile, Liam also sensed that something was wrong.

It had intended to slaughter all these mortals before calmly making its escape. Yet it had been cutting them down for several minutes now, and its claws had torn apart at least several hundred people. Still, the enemies before it seemed endless. Why could it not kill them all?

The reason was simple—under Ruan Wenbo's command, the remaining Players had only entered the pipes together after assembling. More than seventy Players were constantly maintained in front of Liam. At its efficiency, it took seven to eight seconds to kill them all. But that was already longer than the Players' resurrection time. In other words, before it killed the last Player, the first Player it had killed had already returned from death completely unharmed.

Under Bit's Cognitive Filter, Liam could not comprehend the absurd phenomenon of "resurrection." Yet its battle-hardened instincts made it realize that these mortals could not be "killed off."

So it decided to stop tangling with them. It took several steps back, preparing to leap onto the overhead pipes and leave from above. After all, these mortals could not fly.

Just as it bent its knees and gathered strength to leap, a heavy footfall striking metal abruptly sounded behind it.

It knew that sound well. It had heard it only minutes ago. It was the sound made by that Ogryn walking through this area—though at this frequency, it should have been running.

If it had merely been the Ogryn's footsteps, Liam would not have cared much. That slow-witted, sluggish abhuman posed no threat to it at all. But what Liam found unbelievable, enough for its thoughts to stall for an instant, was that the sound had come from behind it.

Behind it? How could it be behind it?!

Liam was certain that every living thing along the path behind it had been cut into several pieces. Even the tenacious Nurgle zombies could not rise again, and there could not possibly be any life left. Furthermore, this C-3 area had only one entrance and exit—the passage in front of it...

If being discovered earlier had been understandable, since Liam's concealment was not some sophisticated psychic technique, then the sound from behind it this time had completely defied all reason.

This utterly illogical event disrupted Liam's thoughts. Far smarter than any of its kin, it was thrown into incomprehensible confusion for the first time, and its poised leap hesitated for an instant.

And that instant of hesitation doomed the seemingly invincible pure-blood Genestealer.

"WOOOOAAAHHH—!"

The freshly resurrected Big Eagle Cop let out a thunderous roar from behind, spread his arms, and used all his strength to lock Liam in a crushing embrace!

The moment it reacted, Liam swung all four arms, shredding the Ogryn's body into pieces again in less than a tenth of a second. But the Players in front had already swarmed forward! Bayonets, dueling swords, entrenching shovels... more than a dozen melee weapons struck Liam solidly all at once!

Though these mortals' weapons only embedded a few inches into its hard carapace before becoming stuck, violet-black blood genuinely flowed from Liam's body. This was its first injury! Liam let out an enraged shriek, sweeping its claws sideways and instantly severing more than a dozen human arms clutching weapons.

All this only pinned Liam in place for a fraction of a second, but that was enough.

The Assassin, who had been circling the edge of the battlefield while binding several Meltabombs together, seized that fleeting opportunity. Fanatical light flashed in his eyes as he pounced without hesitation.

"Long live the Emperor—!"

Endless light and heat erupted with a roar, melting everything away. The terrifyingly high temperatures left behind by the explosion and the liquefied metal flowing everywhere even caused the Players at the center of the blast to die and revive more than a dozen times between the respawn point and the battlefield.

And Liam, without a demigod to protect it, naturally turned completely into boiling liquid the instant the explosion began, under temperatures high enough to melt tanks.

The fates of the Chaos Sorcerer and the pure-blood Genestealer proclaimed a cold truth:

When facing Players, never reveal even the slightest opening.

Fearless of death and charging forward one after another, the [Death Seekers] would seize even the tiniest opportunity and drag those who appeared to hold every advantage down into the abyss of mutual destruction.